Research Groups: Friday, October 30

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Group discussion led by Marisa Brook (faculty) of a paper: Eckert, Penelope (2019). The individual in the semiotic landscape. Glossa, 4(1).

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Dan Milway (Ph.D. 2019): "On the uncountability of possible worlds."

In possible worlds semantics the extension of a proposition in a given context is not a truth value but rather a function from possible worlds to truth values. Using Cantor’s diagonal argument - a method from mathematical logic - I show that this theory of semantics predicts that, although the set of possible propositions and the set of possible worlds are both infinite, the set of possible worlds is larger than the set of possible propositions. I further argue that this incommensurability between worlds and propositions renders possible world semantics semantically incomplete. I close by exploring alternative approaches to semantics, some of which (e.g., situation semantics) suffer from the same problems as possible worlds semantics, while others, which require us to limit the empirical domain of semantics, are still available to us.

52nd Algonquian Conference

The 52nd Algonquian Conference is taking place online from October 23 through 25, hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

• Fiona Wilson (Ph.D.) is presenting "Quantitative analysis of negation in two Cree corpora."
• Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014, now at the University of Manitoba) is presenting "Direct, inverse, and neutral: Refining the description of Algonquian transitive verb forms."
• Will Oxford (Ph.D. 2014) is also part of a talk with Zlata Odribets (University of Manitoba): "Algonquian languages are not ergative."
• Katherine Schmirler (MA 2015, now at the University of Alberta) is presenting "Infrequent morphosyntactic phenomena in Plains Cree: Bloomfield’s text collections and the Ahenakew-Wolfart corpus."
• Katherine Schmirler (MA 2015, now at the University of Alberta) is also part of a talk with Antti Arppe (University of Alberta): "A quantitative look at Plains Cree text types: âtayôhkêwina versus âcimowina in Bloomfield's texts and âcimisowina versus kakêskihkêmowina in the Ahenakew-Wolfart corpus."

Naomi on the Linguist List

Naomi Nagy (faculty) is this week's Featured Linguist on the Linguist List newsletter. Check out the link for more!

Research Groups: Friday, October 23

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Ewan Dunbar (faculty): "The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2021."

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Group discussion of a recent paper: Durvasula, Karthik, and Adam Liter (2020). There is a simplicity bias when generalising from ambiguous data. Phonology, 37(2), 177-213.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Fieldwork Group
Fiona Wilson (Ph.D.): "Quantitative analysis of negation in two Cree corpora"

New book: Punske, Sanders, and Fountain (eds.) (2020)

Congratulations to Nathan Sanders (faculty) and his colleagues Jeffrey Punske (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) and Amy V. Fountain (University of Arizona) on the publication of their groundbreaking co-edited book, Language Invention in Linguistics Pedagogy, now available from Oxford University Press!

This book is the first to explore the varied ways in which invented languages can be used to teach languages and linguistics in university courses. There has long been interest in invented languages, also known as constructed languages or conlangs, both in the political arena (as with Esperanto) and in the world of literature and science fiction and fantasy media - Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin, Dothraki in Game of Thrones, and Klingon in the Star Trek franchise, among many others. Linguists have recently served as language creators or consultants for film and television, with notable examples including Jessica Coon's work on the film Arrival, Christine Schreyer's Kryptonian for Man of Steel, David Adger's contributions to the series Beowulf, and David J. Peterson's numerous languages for Game of Thrones and other franchises. The chapters in this volume show how the use of invented languages as a teaching tool can reach a student population who might not otherwise be interested in studying linguistics, as well as helping those students to develop the fundamental core skills of linguistic analysis. Invented languages encourage problem-based and active learning; they shed light on the nature of linguistic diversity and implicational universals; and they provide insights into the complex interplay of linguistic patterns and social, environmental, and historical processes. The volume brings together renowned scholars and junior researchers who have used language invention and constructed languages to achieve a range of pedagogical objectives. It will be of interest to graduate students and teachers of linguistics and those in related areas such as anthropology and psychology.

Research Groups: Friday, October 16

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Presentation by Samantha Jackson (postdoc) on variation in Trinidadian children's speech.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Qandeel Hussain (postdoc): "Development of rhotic vowels in Kalasha: Language contact, sound change, and biomechanical modeling."

Rhotic vowels are found in fewer than 1% of the world's languages. While vowel rhoticity may be considered marginal from a broad crosslinguistic perspective, it is a basic vowel feature in Kalasha, an endangered Dardic (Indo-Aryan) language which contrasts a full set of oral /i e a o u/, nasal /ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ/, rhotic /i˞  e˞  a˞  o˞  u˞ /, and rhotic-nasal /ĩ˞  ẽ˞  ã˞  õ˞  ũ˞ / vowels. In this talk I present findings of an ongoing project which investigates the development of phonemic rhotic vowels in Kalasha.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.): "Insubordination of an SR clause construction."

Recent literature has analyzed switch-reference (SR) as a type of complementizer agreement (Arregi and Hanink 2018, Clem 2019). Subject coreference is tracked through a probe which interacts with both subjects. Inuktitut has a dependent clause construction, the conjunctive mood, which morphologically marks whether its subject has the same or different reference than the matrix clause subject. I look at cases where the conjunctive mood undergoes insubordination (Evans 2007): where the dependent clause can stand alone to express a particular meaning. This phenomenon creates difficulties for assumptions about SR clause derivation, as there is no matrix clause in an insubordinate construction. How can we derive this pattern?

LGCU Welcome Workshop 12

The annual Welcome Workshop held by the Linguistics Graduate Course Union is happening this year on Friday, October 16, from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM. The workshop is an informal, supportive event aimed at giving incoming graduate students in the MA and Ph.D. programs a chance to introduce their research to each other and to the rest of the department. Everyone is encouraged to attend.

This year's presenters are all beginning either the MA or the Ph.D. program:

• Gregory Antono (Ph.D.): "Countability in Kristang (Melaka Creole Portuguese)."
• Ana Tona Messina (Ph.D.): "Referential density in Tarahumana."
• Nadia Takhtaganova (Ph.D.): "Les titres de civilité : Old French to Modern French honorifics."
• Christina Duong (MA): "The Great Vowel Shift: Shifting the bigger picture."
• Vidhya Elango (MA): "Linguistic capital in Sierra Da Lua, Roraima, Brazil."
• Marjorie Leduc (MA): "A lexical phonological account of Turkana harmony system."
• Justin Leung (MA): "A quantitative approach to the loss of Medieval French verb particles."
• Talia Tahtadjian (MA): "Western Armenian rhotics: Differences in phonemic contrast."

New paper: Soo, Sidiqi, Shah, and Monahan (2020)

Rachel Soo (MA 2018, now at the University of British Columbia), Abdulwahab Sidiqi (BSc 2017), Monica Shah (BSc 2017), and Phil Monahan (faculty) have a new paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 148(4): "Lexical bias in second language perception: Word position, age of arrival, and native language phonology."

The study examines whether non-native listeners leverage their L2 lexicon during a phonetic identification task and whether lexical bias is influenced by word position and length. Native English and native Mandarin speakers were tested on English words where the natural sibilant was replaced by one member of a nine-step [s]/[ʃ] continuum. English speakers experience a lexical bias effect for longer words. No clear bias was observed for Mandarin participants, although age of arrival correlated with amount of lexical bias but only in the initial position of longer words. These results suggest that language proficiency and higher-order linguistic representations drive perception.

Research Groups: Friday, October 9

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Guest speaker: Jiangtian Li (University of Western Ontario): "On polysemy: a philosophical, psycholinguistic, computational approach."

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched clusters in contextual modulation of word meaning and a word is polysemous if and only if it has entrenched clustering in its contextual modulation. I argue that this theory explains all the features of polysemous senses. In order to demonstrate more thoroughly how clusters emerge from meaning modulation during processing and provide evidence for this new theory, I implement the theory by training a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns distributional information through exposure to a large corpus of English. Clusters of contextually modulated meanings emerge from how the model processes individual words in sentences. This trained model is validated against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy, focusing on the gradedness and flexibility of polysemous sense individuation, a human-annotated corpus of regular polysemy, focusing on the regularity of polysemy, and behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. Last, the implication to philosophy of this new theory of polysemy is discussed. I focus on the debate between semantic minimalism and semantic contextualism. I argue that the phenomenon of polysemy poses a severe challenge to semantic minimalism. No solution is foreseeable if the minimalist thesis is kept, and the existence of contextual modulation is denied within the literal truth condition of an utterance.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Guillaume Thomas (faculty) presenting on collaborative work with language consultant Germino Duarte: "Switch-Reference: Syntax and/or (discourse) semantics?"

Guest speaker: Anne Charity Hudley (University of California, Santa Barbara)

We are delighted to (virtually) welcome Anne Charity Hudley, who is a Professor and the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A renowned sociolinguist and scholar of pedagogy, she has been at the helm of extensive, constant, hands-on work that identifies and dismantles the barriers to success in academic environments that disproportionately affect those from racialized/marginalized/low-income backgrounds. Her talk, "A roadmap for inclusion in linguistics," will probe the projects that the Department of Linguistics at UCSB has undertaken to counter the systemic forces that turn away marginalized populations at every level of mainstream education. The talk will be taking place online via Zoom on Friday, October 9, from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM, with a reception to follow.

The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the highest ranked and highest resourced Minority Serving Institution in the world. Considering the designation as both an honor and a call to action, the UCSB Linguistics Department is working to make significant changes to its faculty and student recruitment, its undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and its research and outreach focus. Charity Hudley will focus on methods and models used to engage people in inclusion in linguistics from secondary school through emeritus status, and she will also share challenges that our department has met along the way with a focus on interdepartmental, institutional, and disiplinary concerns. She will focus on three programs that UCSB Linguistics has developed in recent years: School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS), UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics, and the Sneak Peek student recruitment event.

New paper: Brook (2020)

Marisa Brook (faculty) has a new paper in Linguistics Vanguard, 6(1): "I feel like and it feels like: Two paths to the emergence of epistemic markers."

The collocation I feel like has attracted American media attention for reportedly being newly ubiquitous (Baker 2013, Smith 2015, Worthen 2016). While I have proposed that it is becoming an epistemic marker in North American dialects of English (Brook 2011: 65), I have made this prediction of (it) feels like as well. The present study artificially restricts the conventional envelope of variation to evaluate what distinguishes these two phrases in vernacular Canadian English. I feel like is the more frequent by far, but (it) feels like shows a specialization for metaphorical subordinate clauses rather than concrete ones. I interpret this as a case of persistence (Torres Cacoullos and Walker 2009). Before the arrival of the like complementizer, the only predecessors to (it) feels like were (it) feels as if and (it) feels as though, and both as if and as though have a preference for metaphoricality (Brook 2014). I feel like was also preceded by options with as if and as though, but counterbalanced with that and Ø, which prefer concrete subordinate clauses (Brook 2014). The results attest to the value to be found in (cautiously) conducting a microscopic study of a corner of the envelope of variation.

New paper: Ryu, Kang, and Han (2020)

Na-Young Ryu (Ph.D. 2019, now at Pennsylvania State University), Yoonjung Kang (faculty), and Sungwoo Han (Inha University) have a new paper in Language Research, 56(2): "The effects of phonetic duration on loanword adaptation: Mandarin falling diphthong in Chinese Korean."

This study examines how Mandarin falling sonority diphthongs are adapted to a Chinese Korean dialect. It investigates how the subtle phonetic conditions of the source language affect adaptation, and if and how those phonetic effects differ in established loanwords compared to the on-line adaptation of novel loan forms. We found that in this bilingual population, while the Mandarin diphthongs are usually adapted as monophthongs, obeying the native phonological restriction against falling diphthongs, the retention of the input diphthongs in violation of the native constraint is also quite common. Additionally, we found that the choice of the monophthong vs. diphthong realization is strongly affected by the input phonetic duration and in particular, the durational difference among the different tones is robustly reflected in the adaptation patterns.

Research Groups: Friday, October 2

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Discovery day: group discussion of ideas and insights!

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Guest speaker: Javier Domingo (Université de Montréal) on his work with L1 speakers of extremely endangered indigenous languages from Central and South America (Ayapaneco, Tehuelche, Chaná and Yagan) and the construction of the notion of a language's 'last speaker'.